Nineteenth-Century, North American, Indigenous Voices of Disability: An Alternative Care Ethic

Indigeneity is a “state of being” experienced by people whose cultural beliefs and practices link them reciprocally with their linguistic traditions, land, and embodied autonomy. In North America, that autonomy was severed when Westerners seized their land, denied them their culture, and cared for these presumably savage people in ironically savage ways. Nineteenth-century North American, indigenous authors wrote imaginative literature concurrent with the disabling westward expansions and United States government policies that formalized them. These authors pass on cultural stories speaking to regenerative care relationships which reinforce their embodied connections with the land and language. Zitkala-sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin; 1876–1938) crafted short stories challenging the Western care ethic from her indigenous perspective. She offers a care ethics through the interactive language of her oral cultural heritage. Antithetical to the Western one, Zitkala-Sa's ethic is grounded in wholeness, community, reciprocity, and the land. By reinforcing the links between her people, land, and language, she offers a resolution to the two conflicting perspectives.